Toxic Shame: What It Is And How To Heal From It

hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today we are talking about a topic that I have been wanting to make a video on forever this topic is absolutely instrumental in the process of healing from any type of attachment wounding from complex trauma or from essentially any early core wound that kicked us off of our own teams in life and held us back from being able to Value ourselves as individuals who are just as important as anybody else on this Earth so this topic is

the topic of toxic shame before we get started I want to make a couple things clear I definitely did not invent this term I didn't even come close to inventing this term this term has been around for a very long time I'm actually not sure who the first person who proposed it was however someone who has written extensively on the topic of toxic shame is John Bradshaw who is a brilliant and tragically deceased psychologist as well as Pete Walker who I've referenced many times in these videos particularly related to his work on complex PTSD but

both of these men I'm going to draw heavily from The Works of throughout this video so much of what I say here is going to be an adaptation an expansion on the material of John Bradshaw particularly from his book healing the shame that binds you I will put a link to this book in the description of this video I can not recommend it heavily enough it is such a wonderful compassionate comprehensive view of this topic and I cannot imagine having navigated the last couple years of my attachment healing Journey without having read it so with

all of that being said let's get into it what is toxic shame how does it show up and how can we begin combating it if we recognize that it's something we are struggling with the first thing I want to get clear on is that shame in appropriate doses is actually a very healthy thing that can help us learn our limits in the world so when we over indulge when we act in a way that infringes on other people's boundaries shame can come in to let us know hey you overstepped in a particular area you went

too far with something you were doing in some capacity you were behaving in a way that was out of Integrity with yourself so this is what I'm going to call Healthy shame toxic shame is different than healthy shame toxic shame is the feeling that you do not have any sense of Integrity to begin with so toxic shame is the belief that something about us is corrupt rotten broken dirty or wrong at our absolute core when someone with healthy self-esteem makes a mistake or goes past their limits they feel healthy and appropriate shame when someone who

is as John Bradshaw would call it shame Bound in their identity someone who is bound by toxic shame when they make a mistake or go past their own or someone else's limits becomes overwhelmed with the feeling I am a mistake I am worthless disgusting whatever it is that you internalized about yourself at a very young age that became the core of your identity so the shame bound person believes not I have temporarily fallen out of Integrity with myself they believe I have temporarily let the social mask that I wear in the world to prevent other

people from noticing that I don't have any worth their integrity at my core flip and now I'm just petrified that somebody has noticed and I will do anything to cover it up now what type of person tends to suffer from toxic shame or shame bound identity generally anyone who is fairly significantly insecurely attached so anything more than just a bit avoidant or just a bit anxious is going to suffer from toxic shame people who suffer from complex post-traumatic stress disorder tend to have shame bound identities and I want to make it clear that this belief

you have about yourself as inherently unworthy or flawed is not an accurate representation of your worth as a human being the reason this came about and the reason you began thinking of yourself in this way is because early on in life something broke your will so John Bradshaw in the book healing the shame that binds you talks about this concept of a child's will being broken your will is the part of your conscious mind that believes that you are inherently deserving of love care protection Comfort respect all of the things that every human being is

inherently worthy of if your will is broken at a young age you stop believing that you are worth those things and instead you begin to believe that you are inherently worthless to compensate for this Bradshaw goes over the ways in which we learn to show up in the world as either more than or less than human what it means to develop a false Persona that is more than human is to balance out that toxic shame with grandiose beliefs about ourselves I am the kindest purest most innocent person in the world and everything bad that has

happened to me has been some evil other person's fault can be a type of grandiose thought I am inherently better than other people I am cooler smarter funnier I have more money and better looking can also be a grandiose thought these are ways of making ourselves more than human believing that we are in some objective way better than everybody else or we can adopt an identity that is less than human so believing because I am so bad flawed at my core I'm going to lean into it I'm going to gravitate towards a life of crime

and addiction and things that I believe a degenerate person like myself would do that's a way of thinking of the self as less than human and it's really important to note here neither view of the self is accurate at all of our cores we are all inherently lovable worthwhile human beings however some of us have had traumatic experiences and early experiences of disconnection and shame that have caused us to internalize something untrue about ourselves and that thing that we internalize is what we call toxic shame so I'm going to go into a couple of ways

you can recognize in yourself or someone else the presence of toxic shame so what happens once we develop a shame-bound identity and how that identity ends up perpetuating itself as we go through life unless and until we catch it and start to consciously work with it so the first thing that happens when we develop that identity of toxic shame is we become very cagey and inward in our personalities including those of us who are naturally more extroverted in nature so even if we do attend lots of social events and we do free frequently find ourselves

in the company of other people we are always aware of the fact that we must keep our true selves hidden when we are around other people because we are governed by this feeling of being contaminated in some way and so to compensate for this we learn to always be a little bit defensive and guarded around other people we might need to make plans super far in advance because we need to muster up the energy to bring our false selves to the occasion because it doesn't even occur to us when we are shame bound that we

could just go into a situation and act authentic that is our worst fear if we were acting authentic someone might see our inner contamination right so it takes a ton of energy to engage in any social situation in less and until we have fine-tuned a very smooth very effective more than or less than human Persona to play and even in that case there are often times where we just get exhausted from playing that Persona so we might go through periods where we're suddenly canceling all of our plans ghosting all of our friends taking a huge

amount of time to be alone and not be in connection with others because to the shame-bound person the only way to relax and be authentic is to be alone where there's no one around to catch you being your actual self so there's this very natural separation that happens between the you that you present to the world and the you who you are when you're alone with yourself does everybody have this to a small extent yes however the shame-bound person lives it every minute of the day who they are and their social Persona are radically different

and it does not even occur to them most of the time that there is a world in which those two things could be the same which bleeds into the next trait that we see in people who have shame bound identities their can be a confusion of who you are between your real and your fake self so this is not something that is super conscious for you if you are shame bound and have never really thought of it in that term before it's not that you're going to a party and you're like okay time to put

on my fake self as I do before I go to a party it's more like you are frantically trying to find a way to self-regulate with the view of yourself as a competent worthwhile okay person and how you might be doing that is through getting validation from others through achieving things in the external world through if you have one of those less than human personas getting validation of your own Badness of the fact that you are accepted among the people who are considered unacceptable by the rest of society and the only indication that you're behaving

inauthentically might come in the form of frequent recurring depressive episodes that come online when you have been acting from your false self for too long and you absolutely exhaust yourself hit a wall and Retreat for a long period of time to regain your energy until you're ready to show up in the world again as your false self I don't know if there's a person alive out there who suffers from toxic shame who does not also suffer from frequent recurring bouts of depression or anxiety those things go hand in hand because depression and anxiety are the

natural result of existing in the world in an inauthentic way and again this is not you intentionally deciding to be an authentic it is you not knowing that authenticity is an option for someone like you which leads us to the third sign of a toxically shamed or shame-bound individual which is that you avoid psychological mirrors so it's quite common when people don't like the way that they look physically to just avoid mirrors for a period of time in order to hide their own judgments from themselves and this is psychologically what you are doing if you

have a shame bound identity by not showing yourself to anybody else in an authentic way you are avoiding having your true self mirrored back to you by anybody why are you doing that because you are terrified of what you might see if you look in that psychological mirror where do we find psychological mirrors inside of intimate relationships when we truly grow to love trust and show ourselves to another human being exactly as we are we give them the opportunity to reflect us back to ourselves through their responses and interactions to us that is what intimacy

is it is two people being present with the absolute whole of each other both the good stuff and the bad stuff if you are a person with a shame bound identity you will spend your life avoiding intimacy like the plague and I want to be clear you can be extremely anxiously attached and be terrified of intimacy those with more avoidant leaning attachment Styles tend to more consciously be aware of the fact that they're afraid of intimacy but those with anxious attachment Styles tend to believe that they are intimacy junkies when in reality what they are

trying to do is shove the ideal vision of themselves the way they would like to be seen Down someone else's throat so hard that someone looks back at them and goes okay that's the real you for sure you are an innocent pure perfect being who's 100 deserving of love in every single moment unconditionally that is not the truth of anybody all of us kind of suck sometimes however you do not suck in the huge overwhelming terrifying way that your toxic shame is telling you you suck in so you might be using avoidant tactics you might

be using anxious tactics you might be using a variety of manipulation tools to keep yourself out of intimacy even if you are in a romantic relationship with someone else but it is a classic characteristic of someone who is shame bound to avoid intimacy at all costs because you are terrified that if someone actually saw you they would not want to be around you you can be married for like 70 years and never have any moment of true intimacy with your partner this is not as hard to do as it might sound though again you are

likely to have frequent bouts of mental health issues anxiety depression whatever it is if you are chronically engaging with people using your false Persona now the next thing that happens when our authentic selves become shame bound is that we lose connection with our inner wisdom our inner wisdom comes to us in the form of feelings emotions and body States things like anger Joy grief pleasure calmness and serenity all of these feelings are giving us pieces of information that help us discern what is right and wrong for us in life however to be shame-bound means that

from a young age we learned that there was something wrong with the fact that we have feelings so if we believe that our feelings are inherently shameful what we learn to do is either disconnect from them consciously and learn to over rely on logic to make decisions in all situations including situations in which emotional information is the most important factor in decision making or we become dissociated from our true moment-to-moment feelings but in order to continue feeling intensely we become addicted to Fantasy so we create an elaborate fantasy world inside of our own minds we

pick people to become limerent about if you don't know what that word means I have a video I will link in the description of this video called limerence what it is and how to let it go and we feel most of our feelings within that fantasy life that we create why because that fantasy life is where we are safe because there are no spontaneous feelings that will ever arrive within that fantasy world because we are in control of what happens there when you are shame bound you are terrified of spontaneous feelings arising in the body

because you believe that your feelings are shameful and so you only allow yourself to feel things that you have pre-decided you will feel so if you're telling yourself this crazy romantic story in your head about something that's going to happen between you and your crush you might feel totally safe in that moment to let yourself feel excitement Joy passion but in the moment that you're actually in front of that person you might feel Frozen scared and excited for things to just hopefully go the exact way you plan for them to go based on the fake

persona you are presenting to them and then you can go home and feel all your real feelings when you are alone and Ergo safe and again this is not something that anybody would consciously choose you did not choose to either disconnect from those feelings and over rely on logic or disconnect from your real feelings and over rely on fantasy feelings or both this is simply the way that you adapted based on the way that you were raised to avoid feelings of overwhelming shame that get triggered when you feel a spontaneous emotion you learn to Orchestra

your life in such a way that very few if any spontaneous emotions ever Arise at all and one of the last signs that you likely have a shame-bound identity is that you have addictive behaviors addictive behaviors in the shame-bound person develop as a replacement for human intimacy so John Bradshaw talks about addictions as a false secure base when we have a secure base in another human being it means we have a place we know we can continuously return to to get comfort co-regulation and protection when life gets really overwhelming for the person with a shame-bound

identity trusting another person and forming an intimate connection with them is too risky because then they're going to see who you actually are right but we all need a feeling of a secure base so if a person can't provide it we're going to try to find something else that we can use to consistently regulate ourselves that could be alcohol it could also be spending it could be working it could be getting likes on social media it could be fantasy it could be religious or spiritual rituals it could be feelings of Rage feelings of excitement it

could be an obsession or a fixation on the idea of another person who we project all of these fantasies onto it could be a codependent pattern in which both people are shame bound and having a pseudo relationship with each other the intensity and drama of which you can get addicted to any of these things and many more can serve as a false secure base in the absence of the ability to form a truly intimate connection with another human being oh food is another humongous one either overeating or restricting our access to it I have yet

to meet a single shame bound person who does not have a long history of being addicted to something even if that person is completely sober even if that person has never touched drugs or alcohol in their lives there are Myriad things we can get addicted to that are not substances anything we use as a replacement for having a secure base inside of ourselves or other people counts as an addiction if we feel as though we need it in order to regulate ourselves so now we're going to shift away from some of the signs of having

a shame bound identity into the solutions so what do we do to free ourselves from this prison that toxic shame puts us in I want to be clear that this is a very long process however it is a process very much worth taking on because every moment we can free ourselves from toxic shame is one moment where we get our own aliveness back so it only gets better the further along this road we travel and before I talk about the specific steps involved I'm going to talk about what the last step in healing from toxic

shame is and this step is one that takes a long time to complete but all the steps that precede it are going to be working up to this the end goal of healing from toxic shame is exposing your true self to the world so getting in touch with who you actually are at your core understanding that there is nothing wrong shameful or bad about it and then existing in the world as your authentic self so no longer having to save up your energy in order to spend it pretending to be your false self in social

interactions no more avoiding your true feelings because you are terrified of what will come up if you are present in the moment no more zoning out dissociating detaching from reality so you don't have to risk feeling anything you can now be present in every moment because you are not trying to hide anything if you are watching this and you are thinking that is never going to happen for me there will never be a time where I feel that way I felt the exact same way as you years ago in my own life if there is

a person who believed this was not possible it was me if I can get to the place where I can sit in front of you and tell you this is a realistic and possible end goal anybody can get there because I was as cynical a person as they come in this department so let's talk about which steps get you to this place where you're able to begin showing up as you actually are in the world the first step is developing or at least entertaining the idea of a neutral self so when we have a shame-bound

identity we Ricochet between thinking we are the absolute scum of the earth and thinking that we are either more than or less than human in some massive way the truth lies in the middle there is nothing inherently bad broken flawed about us and so there is no need to balance it out with these extreme grandiose thoughts you at your core are just like everybody else the reason you have all these neurotic habits the reason you have a history of addiction or failed relationships the reason why you believe you are broken at your core is because

you had different experiences than other people which caused you to internalize different messages about yourself than other people internalized however you at your core are the exact same as everybody else all the stuff that's on top of it that's just trauma that's just experiences that's just patterns you have internalized that you can learn to let go of so at the least entertaining that idea allowing yourself to spend some time thinking about the concept that maybe you are just like everybody else maybe the reason you're different is because you've internalized different things is the birthplace of

this concept of self-neutrality and I am going to make an entire video about self-neutrality how to define and how to practice it but in essence all you have to do at this step is entertain the idea that what I'm saying here is true and you are not the exception because there is not an exception if you are alive you are as inherently worthwhile as every other person and all of the weird stuff that separates you from them is a product of the experiences you have had that are different step two that I think can be

really helpful for people who are just steeped in that toxic shame is to seek out mirrors for yourself within Solitude so what does this mean that final step in the process is opening yourself up to the world showing up as you authentically are and allowing people to mirror you back to yourself that is probably terrifying from the place where you are starting out so what you need to do is go looking for people who can mirror you as you are right now without you actually having to interact with them it means seeking out resources videos

books courses made by people who have overcome toxic shame I had a period of at least a year and a half where pretty much all I did was read obsessively I read John Bradshaw Alice Miller Pete Walker pretty much every 12-step book that has ever been written you can be atheistic as hell and still get a lot out of those books I looked for every resource I could possibly find about people who once believed they were inherently flawed and broken and who got better and I learned to see myself in the early stages of those

people's stories so there's a quote that I really love from Pete Walker's book cptsd from surviving to thriving where he talks about how this process unfolded for himself and he goes it was not until later in life after I had quite a few years of group and individual therapy that I realized that my journey of recovery had actually begun decades before my formal therapy had it began with all the therapeutic reading and writing I'd instinctively gravitated towards I unconsciously sought the help of others in the many spiritual and psychological self-help books that I was intuitively

drawn to without really understanding it I gained valuable insights about how to improve the way that I treated myself and others just as importantly I subliminally realized that there were a number of good safe wise and helpful adults out there who could be trusted and who had a great deal of wise and kind guidance to offer over time the authors in my community of books seemed like a small tribe of Elders who I imagined as people who would have empathy for me if I were to meet them eventually when I achieved something of a critical

mass of this awareness I managed to take a frightening leap into the water of therapy I lucked out and got a good enough therapist to help me take steps in my healing that I could not manage on my own what this step is all about is recognizing that there is a world out there in which the shame the pain the self-disgust and self-hatred that you feel has been felt by other people who have found their way out of hell and that means that there is a way out of hell and you could find it too

which brings us to The Next Step this step is what I call the stripping down process once we become aware and consciously accept the fact that we've been operating from a place of toxic shame and that that shame is not our true identity we are tasked with getting to know who our true self is in order to figure out who we are we have to figure out who we are not so this process involves us revisiting the story that we tell ourselves about our own lives if you have toxic shame there is a 100 chance

you have internalized a view of yourself as worthless that has pervaded throughout the majority of the time that you have had conscious memories in this step you're going to need to revisit the past and start to properly understand why you developed the beliefs about yourself that you did and why you no longer need to carry those beliefs with you some resources I recommend for this adult children of Alcoholics and dysfunctional families is a brilliant and free resource for doing this work ACA is a 12-step program I recommend it quite often because I believe it is

such a wonderful compliment to or if you cannot afford it alternative to therapy though I highly recommend having a therapist as you work through the program if that's possible for you so you can find online meetings for ACA no matter where you are in the world or you can find in-person meetings in most cities in the world world and in these meetings you will go over with a group a plethora of experiences that you may have had that could have caused you to develop the types of defenses responses and beliefs that you had about yourself

when you were young that you did and in these meetings people also systematically dismantle those old negative beliefs about the self and speak openly about what they're now realizing is and is not true about them so if you find the right group it is a safe place to begin practicing sharing yourself authentically in very small and controlled doses now if for whatever reason you are uninterested or unable to attend ACA therapy is also a wonderful wonderful thing you can take on at this point in the process my belief is that most people who have toxic

shame take a long time to be comfortable with the thought of showing up authentically in therapy as well I had to read like every single a book on the planet before I felt comfortable finally going to a therapist and being honest with them I think I had like three therapists in my life prior to that point and I just lied and bsed my way through every single appointment and those therapists only ever met my fake invulnerable self but once I got to that point that Pete Walker had gotten to where he had started to believe

that they were kind competent and capable adults in the world who would be able and willing to care about someone with a shame-bound identity I intentionally found a therapist who I actually did deeply believe was capable of understanding me a therapist who had worked themselves out of a shame bound place in their own life and who was very open about it so you're going to need to consciously seek out other perspectives to help you make sense of what has happened to you once again the place I recommend starting here is healing the shame that binds

you with John Bradshaw it is the most direct resource I can offer because he has chapter after chapter after chapter in this book where all he does is go into extreme detail about where your shame bound identity may have come from and what you may have internalized about yourself that was not completely correct something else I'm going to recommend about this step of the process is as much as you are able to it can help to abstain from any addictions that you have developed so if you chronically overeat or drink alcohol to soothe your shame

at this point in the process it might be extremely helpful to with the help of support groups if you have them give up your over-reliance on those substances or on those addictive thought patterns and see what comes up when you are not self-regulating through them so I spend almost a couple of years completely sober I did nothing harder than Advil while I was doing this work and I don't believe personally that I could have gotten to the other side of the toxic shame work well I was still numbing myself out with food alcohol drugs excitement

travel fantasy all of the things that I would do to keep myself disconnected from my inner core it is not easy to give up those addictions and I don't want you to think that you are a complete failure if you can't do it with 100 accuracy the important part is to be highly conscious of the fact that we are reaching to those things to mask what's underneath them which is that feeling of toxic shame that feeling of Shame is what we eventually with the help and support of therapists of group members of people who are

in the process with us access stay present with and work through so we can get to the other side of it I remember one of the last addictions to go for me when I was in this process of shedding myself of all of these false self behaviors and trying to get in touch with who I actually was was my addiction to travel so I for a period of like five or six years moved countries every month I was a digital Nomad I absolutely could not function if I did not have a series of trips planned

that I could self-regulate through fan disease of what they would be like when I got there actually being on the trips was not nearly as important as escaping from the present moment through planning and thinking about them and I remember my therapist asking me at one point what if you just stopped what if you just stayed in one place for a while and dealt with the pain that came up as a result and I remember telling him this is what it's like to be me my whole life I have felt like I am paddling on

a raft through this incredibly stormy ocean and if I stop paddling for one minute I'm going to fall off and absolutely drown and every fiber of my being at the time believed that if I did not keep going if I did not stay addicted to this constant motion to this constant movement to this constant distraction from the present moment I would absolutely drown because what I thought would happen if I stopped was that I would encounter myself that I would have to look at myself in the mirror and see a terrible shameful monster looking back

at me what actually happened the first time I looked in that mirror was that I realized there was never a monster there was just a person like everybody else who yeah has some flaws has some things to work on but nothing in the realm of flaws or things I have to work on were anywhere close we're not even in the same solar system as the level of fear that I had around what I thought maybe I would see and the reason I tell that story is because I believe there is some sense of that within

every person who has a shame bound identity the first time I ever told that to someone it was another person who I knew in my personal life they looked back at me and said my entire life I have felt like I'm standing on the edge of a cliff and if I take one wrong step I'm going to fall off it and that was the first honest conversation about shame that I ever had with another human being who had their own chainbound identity and I believe there is some aspect present for everyone who suffers from toxic

shame of that intense overwhelming fear that if you look at it you will absolutely die something terrible will happen and it will be a thing that you cannot come back from that is not true there is nothing in reality you could possibly find out about yourself that is as terrible as what you are imagining now that being said yes you might get triggered you might get overwhelmed you could re-traumatize yourself in the process if you are not moving through it at an appropriate and self-protective Pace this is why you need support groups you need a

therapist if you can find one you need guidance and mentorship and in order to do that you have to again go back to step one and two find a way to convince yourself that there are others in the world who have been through this process who can be in some way trusted because the penultimate step in this process is learning to face sit with and be present with the actual shame the shame that you have spent your entire life and have made every choice you have made in an effort to avoid a second to last

step in the healing process is learning to be present with it and work with it in the body at this point in my life when I feel a toxic shame attack which happens less frequently than it used to but not never what I try to do is pull that feeling of Shame into my body get really acquainted with it notice what's happening in my arms in my torso in my legs in my head become extremely aware of How It's impacting me physically and then saying out loud shame this is shame this is shame and the

more I can repeat that to myself and stay aware of the feeling in my body and present with it the more I start to realize this is a Feeling it is not an objective representation of reality it is just a physical sensation in the body and I can survive it it is not telling me the truth about who I am it is not a crystal ball that is showing me the core of who I am as a person it is just a feeling state that at one point in my life allowed me to shut down

in a way that was adaptive at that time however I am not a child anymore I can be present with this shame now I can name it I can look at it and I can recognize I am still here surviving it I am not dying in the process of encountering and making myself familiar to this shame I am not trying to escape it I don't need to escape it it can't hurt me it's here it's happening I'm surviving it and the more we do all of these steps the more we tear down our false selves

get acquainted with our life stories as they actually happened learn to integrate and be present with our shame the more we will find out about who we actually are underneath that shame what are interests and passions and talents are as the people we actually are because underneath that toxic shame there is not a scary monster there is your actual soul and your actual soul is made up of good stuff interesting stuff the same stuff that everybody else is at their core made up of and getting back in touch with that version of yourself that you

might have stuffed away at like three years old is really fun you get to learn what your interests are you get to learn and reinvent and choose who you would have become if you had had the chance to choose that as a child maybe your real self is a guitarist maybe they're an astronaut I always knew I was like a nerd and that part of me remained true but I also learned that my real self hikes and plays piano there is so many surprises about yourself that you will find out in this process the more

you're able to tear away these defenses and get at the core of who you actually are underneath all of them and once you arrive at that person then you get to learn to reintegrate that person into the world to find activities and communities that mirror who you actually are back to you in a way that's really exciting and fulfilling because you're no longer having these fake interactions you're having real authentic embodied interactions that you can go into not having to hide any part of yourself that is that final step in healing from toxic shame is

realizing that you can be the same person everywhere you go because you have thought through that Wall of Shame you've been terrified of looking at your whole life and it turned out underneath it was actually a pretty cool person and that there is not a reason on Earth why other people wouldn't like as well and all of those scary things in your past all of the traumas all of the hardships all of the mental illnesses all of the coping mechanisms you developed as a response to that shame you have now found a way to speak

about in a self-contained way and maybe you end up becoming one of those people who someone else with toxic shame one day looks up to as the living proof that they can also recover from it alright that's all I'm going to say for today on the topic of toxic shame this topic could be explored in a 25 hour long video and we would still only be scratching the surface but I hope that gives you an idea of the fundamentals of how toxic shame Works how to recognize it in yourself and what needs to happen for

you to begin the healing process as always let me know in the comments what your thoughts reactions feelings are as you watch this I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and your inner children even if they are currently buried under a wall of toxic shame that your job in the future is going to be to free them from and I will see you back here again super soon foreign [Music]